B.C.’s hypocrites are upset about the wrong pipe

While the Greens roil over oil in Pacific, sewage gets a pass

Energetic eco-warriors and their co-conspirators, the green-worshipping politicians across beautiful B.C., may have their collective eyeballs fixed on the wrong type of pipeline.

Instead of getting their moral noses out of joint about more Alberta oil flowing through a big, underground pipe to their pristine Pacific Coast, they might instead focus their energy closer to home on smaller pipes carrying raw sewage that’s dumped, shamelessly, into their own waterways.

Now you can debate climate change and global warming until either the glaciers melt completely or we find ourselves in a new ice age, but when used toilet paper washes up on a beach or riverbank near you, that’s a slamdunk argument that something stinks in your environment.

So let’s look at recent raw-sewage statistics compiled by the good folk at Environment Canada.

In 2013, British Columbians pumped 10 per cent of untreated waste water directly into various rivers and the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile, Alberta’s rate stood at 1.9 per cent of such effluent going straight into our waterways. The numbers for 2015 show our neighbours have actually gotten worse — untreated waste water now flows at an ugly rate of 12.7 per cent while in our province of Alberta we’ve reduced the figure to one single, solitary per cent — still work to be done, but we’re heading in the right direction.

B.C. pumped 10 per cent of untreated waste water into various rivers and the Pacific.

Here in Calgary — yes, the despised ground zero for oilpatch-hating environmentalists and NDP politicians in the land across the Rockies — we have among the most-effective wastewater treatment facilities on the planet.

Former mayors Al Duerr and Dave Bronconnier should take a bow for finding the funds to develop our state-of-the-art facilities, ensuring standards were met and exceeded. Much as Calgarians like to bash city hall, it’s commitment like that that resulted in the influential Economist magazine this week again choosing our city as one of the world’s most livable. (Bronco used to balk at handing out bottled water to civic guests as we’d spent so much making our water clean.)

So, you might well ask, which location in B.C. harbours these folk who won’t fund proper facilities to treat waste water? Go on, have a guess.

Strike me down with a David Suzuki mannequin, but yes, it’s Victoria. It dumps about 130 million litres of sewage into the sea every day. A week’s worth could fill an oil tanker — though I doubt the Asian markets are keenly waiting for such a shipment.

Victoria has been doing this for a century. But federal regulations imposed under the Harper administration have made them get into gear. So there is now a groundswell to actually get this done and build a waste-water facility for the century we are actually living in.

Hey, there are federal grants to suck up some of the cost. There is opposition to this with opponents suggesting they dump it far enough out into the Juan de Fuca Strait and the strong tides will take it away. Imagine if pipeline-builder Kinder Morgan tried that reasoning on for size about potential oil spills from increased tanker traffic.

You’d think that with federal Green party Leader Elizabeth May and provincial Green boss Andrew Weaver representing Saanich and Oak Bay respectively, this deplorable practice would have stopped long ago. Ah, but that might mean their constituents would have had to dig deep into their pockets, just like those dreadful Calgarians once did.

Even more sickening than sewage is the stench of hypocrisy.